1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of computer systems management, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for determining and setting system device configuration relating to power, cooling, and the like, using information circuits associated with system devices.
2. Background Information
Many computer systems are designed and built to have a number of different possible configurations, for example, the IBM AS/400 system or the IBM RS/6000 system (IBM and AS/400 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, and RS/6000 is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation). The configurations may vary in the number of processors, the amount of memory, number of I/O devices and in the required amounts of power, cooling or power sequencing. It may be necessary to detect that certain components are present and correctly configured for the particular processor type used in the systems. It may be necessary to detect that certain voltages, e.g., cache memory voltage, are correctly set for the particular processor type being used in the system.
In the past, such configuration information was determined from configuration pins on backplane or processor cards, for example. However this method was limited by the number of available pins and the effort required to change the configuration identification. It sometimes required the changing of expensive components in order to force a change in the configuration identification when there was no other reason to change the components. For example, changing backplanes could be necessary to force a change to the configuration pins, when otherwise the backplanes would not need to be changed.
Therefore, a need existed for a way of determining device characteristics without the disadvantages and limitations of using configuration pins.